“I just love performing. I’d play polka music if that’s what it took to entertain 300 drunk Germans.” – Dan Roth He doesn’t ONLY perform for drunk Germans, but Dan Roth is talented, willing and extremely able to perform pretty much any music, for pretty much any group of people, pretty much anywhere. These days …
I recently started taking piano lessons. I’m 68. At one time in my life I thought a lot about teaching and learning. That part of my life is over, but taking up the piano has made me think about learning for the first time in a decade. For a universal experience, it’s poorly understood. What does …
AU visited with curator extraordinaire Didi Dunphy at the opening of the Magical Mystery Tour show at the Hotel Indigo’s Gallery on Oct. 26, 2017. Can you tell us about the gallery space here at the Indigo? DD: The gallery at Indigo is a delightful space because it incorporates art into everyday life. It is literally …
The Classic City of Athens, Georgia has a handful of landmarks, places and people you can’t miss. The Arch. That cannon downtown. Ort. The Tree That Owns Itself. And Michael Davenport. If you’ve ever been downtown or on Atlanta Highway and you spot an impeccably-dressed, middle-aged black man with short curls, no arms, a hook and a slim mustache on …
Pip the Pansy (Erin Burchfield) (fka Wrenn, 25) was born in Syracuse, New York, moving to Woodstock, Georgia when she was 10. She played flute in High School but quit the orchestra, veering to visual arts. She then quit visual arts to do theatre. She quit theatre to sing in the chorus. She attended Art School …
The Ancient Whales most recent record, Vestiges of Tails Appear in All of Us, is a mighty wall of introspective, brain-blasting rock. They are three: Enoch Bledsoe (vocals, guitar), Natalie Bledsoe (vocals, bass guitar) and Bryan Poole (vocals, drums). They’ve been called acid rock, alt-rock, riff rock, punk rock, melodic garage rock, flower punk – take …
No one ever said saving the world would be easy…but local artist and recent Lamar Dodd graduate, Gunnar Tarsa, makes it look pretty easy. Artists and their big dreams gravitate naturally to Athens like swallows to Capistrano. Our fair city nurtures big dreams, cultivates talent, and provides a helpful cocoon for artists to soak up the necessary …
Vanessa Briscoe Hay, 62, lead singer of the seminal Athens’ art/post-punk band, Pylon, has ridden quite the wave from her humble beginnings. The climate in Athens, Georgia in the 1970s – especially in the Art School at the University of Georgia – nurtured a creative/cultural explosion of art and music (fueled by countless parties). The …
Athens is a yo-yo town. It’s not home to a particularly large amount of yo-yo toys. It wasn’t the birthplace of early 90’s rap phrases. It’s a yo-yo town in a geographical sense. People live here for a while. They leave. They come back. They leave again. They come back again. And so on, and … Continue reading
It took us almost 3 hours to come up with a name for this thing…and not only that we were feeling no pain at the time. Alcohol and brainstorming have always been friends, good friends, friends with benefits, but mainly friends with the opposite of benefits. But it wasn’t Mark’s whiskey or my Terrapin Professional Beer (FYI … Continue reading
Ember Fox (aka Cheryl Reubner), 30, is a poet, fire-flow/performance artist, entertainer, provocateur, gypsy, self-described “ham.” Her journey led her to Athens, which is not uncommon for artist-spiritual questers who meet up on the secret art nodes. Since her time here, she’s moved on to Chicago, where she created Blue Girl Magic — a “living statue phantasmagoria,” … Continue reading
Harold Rittenberry, 83, has a unique approach to showing his work. “I don’t like to fool around with galleries,” he says. He just places them in his front yard. The Rittenberry Spirit Sculpture Yard is open 24/7, come rain or shine. So if you’re in Athens do stop over to the intersection of Colima Ave. and Rose Street … Continue reading
Hasn’t everything been done to death? Evidently not. This is my 4th foray into the literary/art world as an editor. In the mid-1970s/80s it was Polis (Boston, Provincetown) made with ye olde paper, a few hundred copies for each issue, with fiction, poetry, essays, art. My stint as Music Editor of the (pre-Wired) visionary-tech, psychedelic glossy … Continue reading
